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For video playback, Ubuntu ships with the Totem player. Unfortunately, Totem is severely broken. It only plays Ogg Vorbis files. Even with the addition of codecs, it still doesn't play AVI or MPEG files correctly. That's in my experience.

That's why any new Ubuntu installation of mine always gets MPlayer. MPlayer has been around for quite some time, and is possibly the most complete media player for Linux.

To install MPlayer on Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install mplayer

This downloads about 7MB of files from the repositories. This expands to 18MB of installed applications.

After installation, MPlayer becomes associated with video files. However, it's not the default. Right click on a video file and choose MPlayer to play it.

From the command line, you can also play movies by invoking

mplayer mymovie.avi

Once a movie is playing, MPlayer can be controlled via the keyboard.

Seek backward/forward 10 seconds.

up and down Seek backward/forward 1 minute.

pgup and pgdown Seek backward/forward 10 minutes.

[ and ] Decrease/increase current playback speed by 10%.

{ and } Halve/double current playback speed.

backspace Reset playback speed to normal.

p / SPACE Pause (pressing again unpauses).

. Step forward. Pressing once will pause movie, every consecutive press will play one frame and then go into pause mode again (any other key unpauses).